Method Call Argument Completion using Deep Neural Regression Terry van Walen
[email protected] August 24, 2018, 40 pages Academic supervisors: dr. C.U. Grelck & dr. M.W. van Someren Host organisation: Info Support B.V., http://infosupport.com Host supervisor: W. Meints Universiteit van Amsterdam Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Informatica Master Software Engineering http://www.software-engineering-amsterdam.nl Abstract Code completion is extensively used in IDE's. While there has been extensive research into the field of code completion, we identify an unexplored gap. In this thesis we investigate the automatic rec- ommendation of a basic variable to an argument of a method call. We define the set of candidates to recommend as all visible type-compatible variables. To determine which candidate should be recom- mended, we first investigate how code prior to a method call argument can influence a completion. We then identify 45 code features and train a deep neural network to determine how these code features influence the candidate`s likelihood of being the correct argument. After sorting the candidates based on this likelihood value, we recommend the most likely candidate. We compare our approach to the state-of-the-art, a rule-based algorithm implemented in the Parc tool created by Asaduzzaman et al. [ARMS15]. The comparison shows that we outperform Parc, in the percentage of correct recommendations, in 88.7% of tested open source projects. On average our approach recommends 84.9% of arguments correctly while Parc recommends 81.3% correctly. i ii Contents Abstract i 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Previous work........................................